Originally we had planned this as a three part series, but then we found another female pastor! So we hope you enjoy this bonus perspective on Jesus, Women, and the Church. - Kendall & Tyler

As a pastor, you are somewhat frequently asked about your call into ministry. It might be from a curious congregant or a search committee when interviewing with a new church, but it’s not uncommon to be asked, “When did you first hear the call?” My answer to this question has always been, “It’s complicated.” See, like so many of my female colleagues, I came from a background that didn’t have any space for women in ministry, so when I first felt a call to ministry back in college, I had no idea what to do with it. It simply did not compute. So I just filed it away and went about my business.

While I never heard it spoken of this way, I, like Karmyn, came from a complementarian church background. I don’t remember talking about women and their role in the church too often, but when we did it was simply to point to those passages which speak about women being silent in the Church (1 Cor. 14:33-38; 1 Tim. 2:9-15). Aside from this, the congregation and its leaders themselves were pretty silent. Their actions spoke louder though. I don’t remember ever hearing a woman speak from the stage, whether it was to preach or pray or give announcements. Women weren’t even called upon to help pass the plate for offering. They could teach children or lead Bible studies for other women, but that was about the extent of their leadership roles and participation in the life of the Church. While this limited view didn’t seem to mesh with what I had been taught by my feminist mama about the capabilities of women, I didn’t really give it too much thought. As far as I was taught, the Bible had spoken definitively in these two texts and that was all there was to it.

So fast forward nearly a decade to when my husband (Tyler) left engineering and entered seminary. Nearly half of his classmates there were women. And they weren’t only studying to teach children or other women; many were preparing to be full-fledged, preaching-from-the-pulpit pastors. I didn’t know what to think about that. We would gather together for community mixers and potlucks, and I started getting to know some of these female colleagues of my husband. Many of them were quite gifted. Not only could they dive just as deeply into theological topics as their male peers, they demonstrated pastoral gifting as well. I remember marveling at one female classmate’s innate ability to make a person feel seen. She would just sit there and ask you a few questions and all of the sudden you are drawn into this deep conversation about your relationship with God. It was crazy! This made me wonder, “Why would God give her this beautiful pastoral gift and then forbid her from using it?” That didn’t make a lot of sense.

So I decided it was time to revisit what the scriptures say about women in the Church. Was there more than 1 Corinthians 14 and 1 Timothy 2 to consider? I read some articles supporting women in ministry and found that there is actually a whole lot more written about women than just those two passages! Some of these passages have been touched on in parts 1-3 of this series, but one of the more impactful sections in reframing this issue for me is found in the last chapter of Romans. Maybe like me, you’ve glanced at this list of largely unfamiliar names and chose to skip ahead to the next book. If so, you might have missed how many women are listed here. There’s Phoebe who is listed as a “servant” in some translations, but that word is also just as frequently translated as “deacon” (the Greek word is diakonos). Next you find Priscilla who is listed alongside her husband Aquila. This duo shows up in the New Testament 6 times with Priscilla’s name being listed first frequently; she may have been the more impactful of the two in the life and ministry of the Church. Next is Mary, followed closely by the curious case of Junia. Not being familiar with Greek names, I never paid attention to this, but Junia, whom Paul calls an apostle, is a female name.* That means there was a female apostle! What?!! I remember thinking, “Why has nobody told me there were women leaders in the early Church?!” And that is just the first quarter of this one chapter. There are lots of other verses and passages to consider. Like in 1 Corinthians 11 when Paul talks about propriety in worship, he mentions the importance of a woman having her head covered when she prophesied. If we are to interpret 1 Corinthians 14 as an universally-applicable prohibition of a woman speaking in communal worship, why then would Paul go to the effort of instructing us on how a woman should wear her hair when she speaks during worship? Maybe there was more going on in and around these standard texts about the silence of women in the Church than first meets the eye.

After some months reconsidering the biblical witness to women’s roles in the Church, I finally came to the conclusion that God can and does call women into ministry in his Church too. But it was still years before I could make the leap to accepting that I was one of those called women. Luckily, we serve a God who is both patient and persistent. He hung with me as I tried other avenues of living out that call, like trying to live it out vicariously through my husband, before finally taking the leap and accepting the call he placed on my heart so many years ago. Like so many of my female colleagues, my call to ministry has been complicated as I sought to sift through the many messages I had received about women from the Church. My hope is that my daughter and nieces will not have to walk that same winding path, but can have permission from the Church to step boldly into whatever role to which God would call them. 

* There is also a fascinating history of the Church choosing to read this not as “Junia,” a common female name but as “Junias,” an extremely rare (maybe non-existent) diminutive form of a Greek male name. This reading didn’t appear on the scene until the Middle Ages when it appears the very patriarchal Church didn’t know what to make of a female apostle. In recent years, many translations have transitioned away from this tenuous reading to the more reliable “Junia.”

If you are interested in more detailed perspectives on affirming women in all levels of leadership in the church, check out this selection of articles our denomination (the Evangelical Covenant Church) has put together. (Psst, start at pg. 26.)